The Emergence of Society: From Labor to the Dawn of Human Communities

Society emerged out of labor: as early humans hunted, gathered, and cooperated in tight-knit groups, the loose animal herd gradually gave way to genuinely human community. We have already described how labor shaped humankind. The next task is to introduce readers to the earliest history of human working life, the very process that led to the emergence of society.

How scientists study prehistoric society

Scientists reconstruct prehistoric society mainly from objects buried in the earth, because written records reach back only a few thousand years and cover only peoples who possessed writing. To study the comparatively recent past, a researcher usually turns to libraries and archives that hold written documents. By examining them, one can not only restore the way of life of different peoples but even revive particular events and name the people who took part in them.

The limits of written records

Written documents cannot unlock the vast bulk of human history, which spans hundreds of thousands of years. The era from which written records survive is limited to only a few millennia, and even those documents concern solely the peoples who had a written language. Since the whole history of humankind is measured in hundreds of thousands of years, it is understandable that library archives are powerless to reveal anything about the earliest ages.

Evidence buried in the earth

The earth itself replaces the archive, preserving not only human skeletal remains but also tools and everyday objects that tell the story of the people who made and used them. The entire immense period during which the formation of humans from apes took place — from the appearance of the ape-man to the emergence of the "finished human," the Cro-Magnon — is customarily called the Old Stone Age, or the Paleolithic (from the Greek "palaios," ancient, and "lithos," stone).

The Paleolithic: the Old Stone Age

The Paleolithic is named for the tools of stone, bone, and antler that people of that time used. There is no doubt that they also used wood, but wood rotted away and did not survive. The Paleolithic era is usually divided into two stages: the Early Paleolithic and the Late Paleolithic.

The Early Paleolithic

People of the Early Paleolithic — ape-men and Neanderthals — lived as a herd. They built no dwellings and placed their camps beneath rock overhangs or in natural caves, which they had to wrest from the terrible predators of the age. In search of food, these emerging humans wandered across vast mountain, steppe, and forest expanses.

Food gathering and survival

Every larva, edible root, bulb, or fruit found on the ground was devoured greedily on the spot. Our distant ancestors, of course, did not scorn carrion either. Yet even such food was not always abundant, and often they had to wander for a long time with empty, growling stomachs. Nevertheless, poorly armed as they were in the struggle against harsh living conditions, our ancient ancestors managed to hunt large herbivorous animals.

Hunting techniques of early humans

Early Paleolithic people could hunt large animals more easily than small ones, since bringing down big game required no refined weapons. The discovery of the bones of animals as large as the mammoth at some Neanderthal camps confirms this. To kill a small ground animal or a bird, one needs a bow and arrows, snares, and traps; catching fish requires nets and special hooks. Hunting large animals demanded none of these tools.

Large game was taken through cooperative drives that channelled the herds toward terrain the hunters controlled. Animals were driven into ravines whose exit was blocked by a group of hunters, or herded toward the edges of cliffs so that at least some of them plunged over and were killed by the fall. Hunting could finally be carried out by means of fire drives: a treeless steppe was set alight from the windward side so as to force the grazing herds to flee in a chosen direction — toward steep riverbanks and ravines, where they became the hunters' prey.

Such hunting methods survived into recent times among technologically less developed peoples, for example the Aboriginal Australians and the Papuans, and this continuity offers a living window onto the emergence of society. Even the extremely crude stone implements of Early Paleolithic people were largely adapted to the needs of the hunt — flint flakes with sharp, cutting edges.

Stone tools and their uses

Flint tools of the Early Paleolithic served for butchering rather than killing. Such implements could not, of course, kill a beast, but the flint flakes were entirely suitable for skinning slain animals, cutting hides, and cleaning them of the fleshy residue. Larger flint tools, known as "hand axes," also occur; yet they could neither chop nor pierce anything effectively. Some scholars believe the "hand axes" were used to dig roots, larvae, and other edible material out of the soil.

The use of fire allowed meat to be digested more effectively. Hunting animals that were spread across every climate zone in turn allowed humans to settle widely across the Earth. But the most important effect was that hunting large game promoted the social life of these emerging humans. Primitive hunting required a considerable number of people bound firmly into collectives.

The first social organization and community bonds

Society formed because collective hunting forced individuals to subordinate their impulses to the shared interests of the group. In such associations the wild instincts of primitive people were tamed, since they had to bend their personal, half-animal urges to the common good. To go against the interests and will of the collective meant being killed. Even if a rebel escaped bloody reprisal by flight, he was still not safe from death: solitary life doomed the outcast to want and a half-starved existence and left him defenceless against predatory animals.

Cooperative hunting as the basis of society

Cooperative hunting was thus the foundation on which human community was built. The primitive association of emerging humans — the herd — served as the transitional stage toward properly human society. That society, as Engels wrote, appeared at the same moment that "finished humans" — the Cro-Magnons, or the people of the Late Paleolithic — appeared on Earth.

Division of labor in early society

The earliest division of labor grew out of these collective tasks, distributing the work of the drive, the kill, the butchering, and the gathering of plants among members of the group. Storage of shared supplies of meat and hides, held as common property after a successful hunt, further reinforced mutual dependence and cooperation. This pooling of effort and its products distinguishes human society from the animal herd from which it emerged.

The Late Paleolithic

The tools of the Cro-Magnons are incomparably more varied than Neanderthal ones, which testifies not only to the emergence of society but also to its development. People of the Late Paleolithic were skilled craftsmen in working flint, bone, and animal antler. In their inventory we find points for spears (darts), spear-throwers, awls, and pieces of stone and mammoth ivory with cup-like hollows carved into them.

All scholars agree that these were fat-burning lamps used to light dark caves. The cultural remains of the Late Paleolithic give grounds to state that the chief occupation of the Cro-Magnons was hunting large game. The gathering of plant products, of course, retained some importance. Bone hooks, found in rare cases, also show that the Cro-Magnons were beginning to take up fishing.

The emergence of the Cro-Magnon

The Cro-Magnon, anatomically modern Homo sapiens, marks the point at which fully human society appears. Soviet archaeologists have accumulated an enormous body of material that allows a fairly clear picture of the way of life and labor of Early and Late Paleolithic people.

Among the Paleolithic sites discovered by Soviet scientists, two stand out where — alongside tools and animal bones — Neanderthal skeletal remains were found.

The Kiik-Koba cave also yielded a significant quantity of animal bones — of the giant deer, wild ass, boar, saiga, arctic fox, and wolf. The Kiik-Koba site is thought to be one of the most ancient in Europe. Of still greater interest is the site opened by A. P. Okladnikov in 1938 in the Teshik-Tash cave in the Baysun district of the Uzbek SSR.

This cave contained a considerable number of bones, including the skull of a Neanderthal child about nine years old. Crudely worked flint tools were found there too, along with the bones of certain animals, among them many horns of mountain goats hunted by the Teshik-Tash Neanderthals.

That claim rested on the fact that Neanderthals lived in Europe during the Ice Age, when temperatures were far lower than now and the animals they hunted were different. Had there been no cold, supporters of the glacial theory asserted, there would have been no human being at all. The Teshik-Tash find overturned this speculation too.

It turned out that when Neanderthals lived in Central Asia, there was no glaciation there, and the climate and animal world were almost the same as today. It follows that in Europe and Asia, under different natural conditions, lived people of the same kind who made tools of the same type. Therefore it was not climate but labor, as Engels wrote, that was the main factor in human evolution.

The first data on the Teshik-Tash find were published by the prominent Soviet anthropologist G. F. Debets as early as 1938. A detailed study and description of the find was carried out by a team of researchers at the Institute of Anthropology of Moscow University, headed by Professor M. A. Gremyatsky. The collection "Teshik-Tash," in which the results of studying this valuable find were published, was awarded a high distinction, the Stalin Prize, in 1950.

The skull of the Teshik-Tash child was found broken into roughly one hundred and fifty pieces. It was reconstructed by the anthropologist-restorer M. M. Gerasimov. On the basis of the restored skull he also created a sculptural portrait of the Teshik-Tash child for the Museum of Anthropology of Moscow University. It is worth noting that Gerasimov reconstructed the appearance of other fossil people of the Old Stone Age, as well as historical figures.

Gerasimov's work "The Foundations of Facial Reconstruction from the Skull" was also awarded the Stalin Prize in 1950. Among some foreign reactionary scholars a theory was current claiming that Neanderthals were not the ancestors of the Cro-Magnons, that the two kinds of people lived at the same time. According to this theory, the Cro-Magnons were a "higher" breed of people.

They came into Western Europe, exterminated the Neanderthals, and settled there themselves. The remnants of the Neanderthals, under Cro-Magnon pressure, supposedly left Europe for Africa and Asia, where they gave rise to the modern peoples of those lands. It is to the credit of Soviet anthropologists that this false theory was exposed. They discovered and described a series of finds forming a transition from the Neanderthal type of human to the modern one.

Such finds were made in the Northern Caucasus (Podkumok), near Moscow (Skhodnya), on the Volga (Khvalynsk), and near Dnipropetrovsk in Ukraine. Similar intermediate finds were discovered in Czechoslovakia and in Palestine. The Neanderthal skull from the Skhul cave in Palestine, for example, has a forward-projecting chin, like that of modern humans.

Let us also note that skulls of modern people are sometimes found bearing certain weakened Neanderthaloid features. Finally, it must be pointed out that Neanderthal skeletal remains are found in more ancient earth layers than Cro-Magnon ones. Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon finds have never been discovered in one and the same layer.

This refutes the fabrications of reactionary scholars who try to undermine the teaching of the ape origin of modern humans and to prove that they supposedly have no fossil ancestors. As we can see, the emergence of society took place not locally but in different regions. No less credit belongs to Soviet archaeologists for their study of the way of life of Late Paleolithic people.

It is enough to note that over the past thirty years, roughly three hundred Late Paleolithic sites have been surveyed and excavated in the USSR.

Let us focus on two of them. In 1946 a joint expedition of the Museum of Anthropology of Moscow University and the Institute of the History of Material Culture of the USSR Academy of Sciences, led by M. V. Voevodsky (1903–1948), discovered a Late Paleolithic site near Kursk, whose excavation continued through 1947–1949. The site is located on the bank of the small river Rogozna (a tributary of the Seym), where the village of Avdeevo now stands.

The Avdeevo site lay somewhat south of the glacial boundary. The climate here was harsh. The terrain was tundra passing into arid steppe. Permafrost lay not far below the surface of the soil. Nevertheless, the animals hunted by the people of that time were abundant here. As the glacier advanced from the north over tens of thousands of years, the vegetation thinned and then perished entirely beneath the ice cover.

As for the animals, those that failed to adapt to the climatic changes died out, while the rest gradually moved farther south, adjusting to the new conditions of life. Thus the territory lying south of the glacier became a kind of refuge in which many different animals gathered.

Here mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, reindeer, musk oxen, brown bears, wolves, arctic foxes, wild horses, and others were plentiful.

Judging by the cultural remains found in them, it can be assumed that some of the dugouts served as storerooms for reserves of food and hides accumulated after each successful hunt. This was communal property. Given the total number of residential dugouts and their sizes, it should be assumed that the Avdeevo site consisted of about forty to fifty settled hunters.

Among the tools discovered at the Avdeevo site are flint blade-like flakes, small chisels, burins, and drills. Products of mammoth ivory were also found — so-called adzes, apparently used as digging tools, along with piercers, polishers, and awls. There are ornaments in the form of specially made pendants and pierced animal teeth.

Several female figurines of mammoth ivory also turned up at the site. Of no less interest is the Late Paleolithic Talitsky site, named after M. V. Talitsky (1906–1942), who discovered it in 1938 and died in the struggle against the Nazi invaders. The Talitsky site is located in the region of the northwestern Urals, on the Chusovaya River, not far from the city of Molotov.

The Talitsky site, later studied by several other Soviet scholars, yielded abundant archaeological material. This was the camp of semi-settled hunters who lingered here for several years. Hearth pits filled with the charcoal of burnt bones — chiefly mammoth and woolly rhinoceros — were found at the site. Bones of wild horses, reindeer, roe deer, arctic foxes, and some other animals were also discovered.

The Talitsky site testifies that as early as about twenty-five thousand years ago people had spread widely across our land, penetrating far to the north. Although people were already moving toward a settled way of life in the Late Paleolithic, they still practised neither farming nor herding, and their main occupation remained hunting large animals.

But there is some ground to suppose that by this time the dog had already appeared (a tamed wolf in some places and a jackal in others), which was perhaps not only a guard of the camps but also accompanied humans on their hunting travels.

From gathering to agriculture: the Agricultural Revolution

The Agricultural Revolution transformed human life by replacing the endless search for wild food with deliberate food production. When people first learned to sow crops and tame animals — beginning in the Middle East, and independently in places such as Ancient China, India, and elsewhere — they no longer had to follow the herds. Settled farming villages could store surpluses, support larger populations, and remain in one place for generations.

Food production and settled communities

Settled communities arose once horticultural and pastoral economies made a reliable food supply possible. Nolan and Lenski, among modern sociologists, classify societies by their economy and technology, tracing a sequence from hunting-and-gathering bands through horticultural and pastoral societies to agrarian societies. The economic surplus generated by farming allowed some members of the community to specialize in crafts, trade, and governance rather than food-getting — a decisive break from the Paleolithic camps described above, where every able adult had to contribute to the hunt or the gathering.

The rise of ancient civilizations

Ancient civilizations grew out of the food surplus that farming made possible, giving rise to the first cities and states. In Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, Ancient China, and India, dense populations, writing, monumental building, organized religion, and central government appeared. The formation of cities and states concentrated power in the hands of rulers, priests, and warriors, and warfare and trade linked these early civilizations across the Middle East, Europe, and beyond.

Class hierarchies and social stratification

Social stratification — the division of a society into ranked classes with unequal wealth and power — first became entrenched in the ancient civilizations. Where the Paleolithic camp held its supplies as communal property, the agrarian state divided people into landowners and labourers, rulers and ruled. Karl Marx analysed this pattern as class conflict, tracing history through the antagonism between those who own the means of production and those who work them. Friedrich Engels, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, argued that private property, the patriarchal family, and the state arose together as wealth accumulated, displacing the older matrilineal descent and matrilocal residence he believed characterized early human society.

Theoretical perspectives on the emergence of society

Thinkers have explained the origins of society in sharply different ways, from social-contract philosophy to materialist and evolutionary theories. Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan, imagined a pre-social "war of all against all," a natural condition of mankind so violent that people surrendered their freedom to a sovereign through a social contract. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in The Social Contract, instead grounded legitimate authority in popular sovereignty and the general will. Sir Henry Sumner Maine, in Ancient Law, traced society back to patriarchal despotism and the family, while Lewis Henry Morgan, in Ancient Society, reconstructed the gens or clan system as the earliest form of social organization.

The discipline of sociology itself emerged in nineteenth-century Europe in response to revolution, warfare, industrialization, and urbanization. Auguste Comte coined the term and founded positivism, the study of society through scientific method. Herbert Spencer applied evolutionary ideas — later labelled Social Darwinism — to build a structural-functionalist account of society as an organism, drawing on Charles Darwin. Émile Durkheim examined collective conscience, the sacred and the profane, and the incest taboo in primitive societies; Max Weber analysed bureaucracy, authority, and religion; and Georg Simmel probed the forms of social interaction. Sociology was later institutionalized in North America as an academic field.

A materialist understanding of social development

The materialist view holds that society and its institutions are historical-economic expressions rather than fixed or natural facts. In this reading, drawn from Marx and Engels, the state, the family, and class hierarchies are not eternal but arise at particular stages of economic development and can be transformed by the same forces that created them. Where bourgeois philosophy treats organization as timeless, the materialist critique treats every form of organization — from the Paleolithic hunting collective to the modern capitalist state — as the product of concrete conditions of labor and property.

Industrialization and the transformation of society

The Industrial Revolution reshaped society as profoundly as the Agricultural Revolution had done thousands of years earlier. Beginning in Britain and spreading across Europe and North America, the factory system replaced craft workshops with mechanized production, drew rural populations into rapidly growing cities, and created a new industrial working class. Charles Dickens portrayed the harsh workplace conditions, child labor, and poverty of the early factory towns, conditions that fuelled social reform movements. The Luddites, associated with the semi-legendary General Ned Ludd, resisted industrialization by destroying the machinery they blamed for their ruin.

Industrial capitalism also produced its own forms of working-class self-organization. Trade unions and Social Democratic parties emerged to defend workers' interests, while more radical currents — the Spartacus League, the KAPD, and council communists such as Karl Schröder — debated party structure, centralism, and the critique of reformist socialism, insisting that the proletarian organization needed to break with bourgeois methods rather than imitate them. These debates over how a class organizes itself echo, in a far more complex setting, the very cooperation that first bound the Paleolithic hunting band together.

Later still, postindustrial societies of the Information Technology Age have shifted employment from manufacturing toward services, knowledge, and information, making education central to economic life. Across this long arc — from hunting-and-gathering bands to agrarian states, industrial nations, and information economies — the fundamental lesson of the emergence of society holds: human communities are shaped by the way people work, cooperate, and organize the production of the things they need to live.

Comparisons with modern hunter-gatherer peoples

Living hunter-gatherer peoples give scientists a window onto how Paleolithic societies may have functioned, since their tools, food-getting, and social bonds resemble those reconstructed from the archaeological record. Anthropologists using resources such as the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample compare foraging peoples worldwide to test theories about early kinship, gender relations, and the sharing of food. Pierre Clastres argued that many such societies were deliberately organized to prevent the concentration of power, a finding that complicates simple assumptions about the inevitability of the state. As Engels observed of the earliest human communities, cooperative labor and shared property — not private accumulation — were the original basis of social life, and modern foraging peoples continue to illustrate how societies can function on that foundation.